UX Audit

A discipline that analyses the usability of an application by assessing its interaction design and user experience.

More terms you might want to know

Affordance

Affordances describe a relationship between the environment and an animate object, classified as either positive or negative.

Items, such as a car that leads to movement, have a positive affordance. Things like stairs that lead upwards have a negative affordance because they will not allow for any other form of movement other than up or down if used accordingly.

Design Debt

A concept used in systems design to describe the negative consequences of making seemingly innocuous design changes. Shorthand for a product's delayed but inevitable need to be reworked due to earlier, seemingly trivial decisions not having been fully thought through in the original release.

Designers incur this "debt" by making quick and easy choices that save time in the present but cause more complex problems later on down the road when it becomes necessary to change or add something.

Proximity

The placement or otherwise of a thing in relation to other things. In design, proximity may be considered as the distance between two items in space or their relative location to each other.

Complementary Colours

Colours that directly across the colour wheel, like blue and orange. When you put these colours next to each other, they make a great contrast together. Complementary colours are often found in nature.

Right-aligned

Text that flows from right to left and is the default reading direction of a page with its content aligned on the right margin.

Monogram

An iconic design that is made up of two or three letters.

Hamburger Menu

A well-known UI element in computer applications. It's an expandable menu of context-specific commands typically launched from the application's main menu.

Type Classification

A system used to describe and identify typefaces by their basic visual characteristics.

Skeuomorphism

The use of design features that are shaped to resemble a familiar object or thing in order to facilitate user interaction.

AI File

An Adobe Illustrator vector format file. Files with the extension .ai are often used for artwork and illustrations as users can resize them without distortion. It is composed of several layers with objects and text on each layer. Users can import Illustrator files into many other programs like InDesign, Acrobat, Photoshop etc. If you design or print your t-shirts, you can create your designs in Illustrator and apply them to your t-shirt using a heat press.

Problem?

Got a suggestion or found an issue with the glossary?
Let me know!